JioTV, the Live TV app by Reliance Jio, has acquired the exclusive India digital rights for the upcoming T20 cricket series Nidahas Trophy from March 6 to 18. The digital platform also streamed Winter Olympics 2018 last month.
The event coverage on JioTV will include live and repeat telecast and highlight packages. Nidahas Trophy is a tri-nation T20 competition, will be played at Colombo between Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India.
Recently, Reliance Jio—known for its budget offers and cheap data plans—began offering 10 GB data to users specifically for streaming on its JioTV app every month, in addition to their usual data plan. JioTV app has 583 channels, including 39 HD channels, in several Indian languages.
Telcos and video streaming
Big telecom service providers are expanding their over-the-top (OTT) service offerings. Airtel TV, another on-demand Live TV app, and the direct competitor of JioTV, recently partnered with Hotstar to host Hotstar content on Airtel TV app. It claimed that Hotstar’s content library of about 100,000 hours of content, in 9 languages, from channels across the Star network will be available to for free through the Airtel TV app. When Medianama checked then, it did not find Hotstar labelled content.
Airtel TV natively streams about 350 plus LIVE TV channels like Zee, Sony etc, and close to 10,000 movies and shows from India and abroad. Earlier, earlier tied up with video streaming provider Ditto TV and online publisher Juggernaut Books for content.
Both Jio and Airtel apps are currently available for free to those who use the respective operator’s telecom service.
Vodafone also partnered with OTT player Yupp TV late last year to strengthen live TV offering on Vodafone PLAY, exclusively available to Vodafone users. It also has a deal with video on demand (VOD) platform HOOQ to add video content onto Vodafone Play. It also has content streaming partnerships with Eros Now and a tie up with Amazon for offering Prime Video to its customers for a discounted subscription.
Telcos seem to be following a multi-pronged approach to prevent users from switching to Jio, which offers bundled services for low prices and has cut into their revenue shares after its entry into the market in 2016.
